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Reading the Fathers

Excerpt from a Sermon by Bishop [now Archbishop] Chrysostomos

The voice of the Fathers
rings out everywhere in our Faith. It is to the voice of the
Fathers that we turn to confirm, in living form, the Faith which
we preserve in our confessions, our statements of Faith, and our
theological traditions. The core of an inner understanding of the
Orthodox Faith lies always in our grasp of the consensual
theologythat golden chain of common thought and spiritual
experiencethat binds the Fathers together, so that they
speak with one mouth and with one heart.

It is important, then,
that we read the Fathers in a proper way. Firstly, we must make
ourselves familiar with the confessional dogmas of our Faith, so
that we know what it is that the Fathers hold in common; for,
indeed, it is the consensus of the Fathers that constitutes the
oneness of the Patristic witness in Orthodoxy. Those things about
which the Fathers differ, at well as those matters in which some
Fathers inadvertently erred, are not our concern. We must draw on
their commonality of thoughtexpressed in the dogmas and
doctrines which the Church has codified, since in that
commonality is to be found the mystical "phronema,"or mind, of the Fathers, a mind which, in turn, is one with
that of Christ. Modern scholarship"punk Patristics," as I call
itwhich prides itself in finding the differences between
the Fathers is not only fruitless, but it violates the spirit of
Patristic study as I have described it.

Secondly, one must
understand that the Fathers build on one another. They
consciously draw on each other, just as a scientist builds on the
evidence and data provided to him by his predecessors. One must
read the Fathers, therefore, with the spirit of a scientist, not
that of an artist.

As a case in point, in
an otherwise interesting article on St. Gregory Palamas, a
clergyman recently noted that "Gregory Palamas"
defended the Faith of the Fathers "not simply by repeating
and parroting their ancient formulas and words, but by
'incarnationally' re-defining and reinterpreting their
message" [see Daniel Rogich, "Homily 34 of Saint
Gregory Palamas," The Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 33(2),
135-156].

In fact, St. Gregory
Palamas very carefully points out in a number of his writings
that he is "imitating" those before him, "speaking
in their words," and following in their steps. We must not
succumb to fancy defenses of the Fathers, based on a fear that
they might be accusedand this is often the accusation of
Western polemicistsof a lack of creativity. If we look at
the Fathers as scientists, their creativity rests on their
ability to follow the formulas and words of their predecessors
and to attain the common mind of the Fathers. Their creativity is
not in redefinition, whether "incarnationally" or
otherwise, hut in the application of truth to themselves, the
appropriation of that which the Fathers before them held in
common, and their contribution to the process of passing down
unchanged truthan unchanged truth on which we must draw and
which we must attempt to pass on ourselves. We must always keep
this in mind.

Thirdly, we must read
the Fathers with awe. They are not, as some silly observers have
put it, "just like us." The Fathers have always striven
to stand in the place of those who healed the sick, conversed
with Angels, and even raised the dead. The holy men and women who
constitute the Patristic witness are precisely what we are not,
since they have succeeded in uniting themselves to the holy men
and women before them who, transformed in Christ, served as their
models, taking them from darkness to light. The Fathers are what
we must become in a similar transformation. They are not
the "guys next door." They are not to be measured for
their "human qualities." They are now the Saints
"above," and we must draw on those divine qualities
which they developed by restoring in themselves the image of
sanctity. If we have anything in common with the Fathers of the
Church, this will be revealed only when we, too, have attained to
holinessa holiness measured not by our mundane abilities,
but by what is added to us by Grace in our ascent toward
spiritual perfection.

Next, we must approach
the Fathers, not with the rubrics of scholarshipwhich often
lead one to misinterpretation and error, but with those of
"spiritual" investigation. If the scholar looks for
"information," the spiritual seeker looks to the
Fathers for "guidance." And bound up with this notion
of spiritual investigation is a care for authenticity and truth
unknown to scholarship. A scholar can treat a Father
superficially, offer a few profound comments about his teachings,
and then move on to another pursuit. Only his ego or academic
recognition are at stake. However, a spiritual seeker, since his
soul and eternal life are at stake in his study, read the
Fathers with extreme care, often taking years to elucidate even a
simple point.

Again using St. Gregory
Palamas as an example, let me make some comments on this point.
The writings of St. Gregory Palamas are complex beyond
description. They are summaries of some of the most profound
teachings of the Fathers before him, as St. Gregory himself
states, and they are expressed in a Greek which is unmatched in
its complexity. Indeed, I have met few writers who, despite their
many articles and treatises on this great Father, can actually
pass my acid test, as I hand them a volume of the yet uncompleted
collection of St. Gregory's writings and ask them to translate a
paragraph at random, either from the original Greek or the modern
Greek text.

Many in the West
unfortunately begin their study of St. Gregory Palamas with a
book written some years ago (originally in French and,
fortunately, somewhat revised in later English editions) by
Father John Meyendorff. His book is plagued by mistranslations of
St. Gregory, whom he rendered into French. They lead to some very
fundamental distortions of St. Gregory Palamas' teachings, as
Father John Romanides has pointed out in a brilliant commentary
on Father Meyendorffs book [see esp. "Notes on the
Palamite Controversy," The Greek Orthodox Theological
Review, 9(2), p.238], and these distortions have been
repeated by writers who, in keeping with the rubrics of
scholarship, are more fascinated by a "new thinker"
than by the meat of spiritual life offered to the souls of those
who look to St. Gregory Palamas as a model for spiritual growth
and enlightenment. In short, they perpetuate Father Meyendorff's
errors and fail to read St. Gregory himself.

Finally, we must not let
political ecumenism distort what the Fathers have written. The
Orthodox Fathers write what they do with a true concern for the
truth, and thus words like "heretic" and "defiler
of the Faith" are to found in their writings. They do not
use these words in the spirit of hatred that marks so many misled
Orthodox zealots today, but out of a deep and abiding concern for
the protection of their readerstheir spiritual
childrenfrom wrong teaching. There is nothing embarrassing
about this aspect of the Fathers for mature Christian thinkers,
and we must heed the message in these harsher words of the
Fathers with care. We are not free to pick and to choose.

St. Gregory Palamas
begins one of his essays on the Holy Spirit with comments about
the Latins that would shock an ecumenist. He dismisses the Latins
as heretics and denies all of the political formulas by which, in
our hypocritical age, what is not Orthodox is suddenly made so.
Had Father John Meyendorff, again, heeded this point, his book on
this great Father might have been more loyal to the teachings of
St. Gregory.

Barlaam well may have
been, as St. Gregory Palamas believed and intimates, a Latin who
went East to foster compromise and dissent, so as to provoke a
political union between the Orthodox and Rome [cf. Romanides,
supra, 6(2), p. 193]. And St. Gregory Palamas may well have been
a champion of the same kind of resistance which we Old
Calendarists are waging today against the machinations of Rome in
attracting Orthodox ecclesiastical politicians into a union based
on ecclesiological relativism and a betrayal of the Orthodox
Church's claim to primacy. Perhaps this is why the Uniates (Greek
Catholics) still celebrate the second Sunday of Lent, dedicated
in the Orthodox Church to St. Gregory Palamas, as the Sunday of
the Holy Relics. And perhaps Father Meyendorff's insensitivity to
the less edifying side of ecumenism hid from his eyes the wisdom
of St. Gregory's warnings against Latin intrigue as they apply to
our own days!

If we are to learn from
the Fathers, we must turn from the emptiness of scholarly
egotism, snide doubt about things sacred, and superficial tomes
praised by the world but disloyal to the teachings of those about
whom they are written.